Ian Simmers was sixteen years-old when he was arrested for the murder of Rodney Gochanour, who had been stabbed along a well-traveled footpath near a marina in Bothell, WA. Simmers had been arrested with a friend for breaking into boats and setting off flares. When the friend was interviewed about their activities and queried about the stabbing, he drew suspicion to Simmers. Simmers, under questioning by police, confessed to the stabbing murder and re-enacted it. The conviction was eventually vacated, in part because of a lack of physical evidence tying him to the crime, bolstered by arguments that the interrogation was coercive and Mr. Simmers was a youth and developmentally immature. Mr. Simmers then filed a civil suit against the municipality.
Attorneys for the municipality and the officers retained The Forensic Panel to study the reports of the law professor and researcher advocating that police approaches to Simmers was coercive. The Forensic Panel’s review identified various arguments made by the academics that had no scientific foundation. Moreover, the forensic psychiatrist’s closer study of the litigant was himself revealed him to be without the vulnerabilities associated with false confession to murder, and to have been highly manipulative to police in their interrogation. Mr. Simmers’ responses were by his account, cleverly designed to suggest his innocence even as he was confessing.
After deposition of all witnesses, including The Forensic Panel’s testifying psychiatrist, the court threw out the case on summary judgment. To this day, prosecutors believe Mr. Simmers was the real killer, but they have elected not to retry him because witnesses have passed away and they assessed the twenty plus years served to be sufficient. Mr. Simmers’ efforts to leverage his release into a claim of false confession relied upon arguments by mental health professionals, arguments that were debunked by The Forensic Panel’s closer scrutiny and fluency in the science of this issue.
